[
The Dead Speak! And they star in movies too in the upcoming As Deep as the Grave, which features an AI-recreation of Val Kilmer in an important role, despite the actor passing away in 2025 and having never filmed any material for the film.
At Wednesday’s CinemaCon, the first teaser trailer for As Deep as the Grave was debuted, followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers, including director Coerte Voorhees and his brother, producer John Voorhees, moderated by Variety’s Brent Lang. Since the announcement was made about the AI recreation of Kilmer being a part of the film, there’s been some curiosity mixed with plenty of very understandable negative reactions to the news, amongst an ongoing debate about the ethics of ever placing an artificial version of a deceased actor in a movie they didn’t actually make.
Overall, it’s difficult not to feel like this whole endeavor is off-putting and gimmicky, something the trailer did little to dissuade. From Real Genius to Top Gun to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Val Kilmer was an awesome onscreen presence. But it’s hard to enjoy watching something that can never truly be anything more than a mimicry of the actor, no matter how much it looks or sounds like him.
Yes, there are some unique specifics about how the AI version of Kilmer ended up in As Deep as the Grave, given Kilmer had, in fact, initially agreed to be in the movie many years ago. Production began back in late 2020, and Coerte noted they were one of the first movies to begin to film in New Mexico again in the midst of strict Covid protocols, though they also had many starts and stops as a result, stretching into 2021.
However, Kilmer’s deteriorating health meant he had to drop out of the project before he filmed any material. Initially, the decision was made to simply cut his character, Father Fintan, from the story, with Coerte saying they eventually decided something important was missing without Fintan in it.
Set in the 1920s, the story focuses on real-life archeologists, husband and wife Earl and Ann Morris (played by Tom Felton and Abigail Lawrie), whose impressive claims to fame include Earl serving as an inspiration for Indiana Jones and Ann having a place in history as the first female archeologist ever. Father Fintan is a Catholic priest with tuberculosis (yes, this obviously evokes Kilmer’s amazing performance in Tombstone), and the Voorhees’ said Kilmer was very attracted to the film and its themes, including how it tied into his own Native American heritage.
The Voorhees’ are obviously aware of the controversy around the film, and when asked their response to those saying this is inauthentic and opening Pandora’s Box, John Voorhees replied, “That is absolutely their right to say that.” He added they did “what we believe is really the only way to actually ethically do something like this,” noting that Val Kilmer’s children, Mercedes and Jack, had given them “an enthusiastic yes” when approached about the possibility of recreating their father in AI. The Kilmer family provided a large amount of personal footage of Kilmer as reference, beyond his film roles, and John noted they were following current SAG guidelines for AI recreations, which includes “the three Cs: Consent, compensation and collaboration.”
But this AI Kilmer’s role is no mere cameo, with the filmmakers revealing that in the current cut of the movie – which they added is quite long, though they wouldn’t give a specific runtime – he’s in an hour and seventeen minutes of it. Yet asked if they would describe this as a Val Kilmer performance, Coerte replied, “Val Kilmer influenced this performance.” Which again gets back to the issue at hand, which is no one is actually giving a performance as Father Fintan, since it’s all artificial.
Val Kilmer was a terrific actor and it’s a shame he didn’t get to play this role like he wanted to, but it doesn’t change the fact that he didn’t play this role. Any AI recreation of Kilmer is not giving us the performance as he would have actually done it, it’s giving us a pastiche of how he might have done it. Kilmer was such an interesting and eccentric actor, who’d make surprising choices in most of his roles, and even though the AI was trained on his previous work, it can’t actually predict what he would have done while on set. At one point, John Voorhees made a comparison about how their recreation of Val Kilmer was similar to Val Kilmer playing the role of Jim Morrison in The Doors, given that wasn’t the real Morrison on screen. But that was still a human being actually acting on screen, which is what made it so compelling.
The big question with all of this, of course, is why not simply recast the role following Kilmer’s death. The Voorhees’ had previously told Variety this was because by the time they decided Kilmer’s character was crucial and needed to be put back in, the belabored production had long wrapped and “We can’t roll camera again. We don’t have the budget. We’re not a big studio film. So we had to think of innovative ways to do it.”
This made me curious how then they had other actors interacting with Father Fintan, which I asked the brothers about after the press conference. John Voorhees told me some creative editing was used, presumably incorporating moments where the actors were speaking to a different character originally.
Said Voorhees, “There’s a lot of movie magic here…. We are constantly rearranging things, editing characters together as best we can as an independent film. So it’s more of that. I just put this right down the middle of just the way you have to make a movie. It’s so that people believe what they’re seeing on the screen. We use every tool in the toolkit, and now we do have newer tools to do that, and it does make thing. It opens up the possibilities to do more with this new technology.”
Yet even as many would prefer AI simply wasn’t used in filmmaking at all, it surely wouldn’t have felt as egregious if they had a different actor film the Father Fintan dialogue in front of a green screen and then used AI to recreate the environments the original scenes were shot in to incorporate him into the story rather than actually recreate Kilmer himself.
The one line we hear Father Fintan say in the trailer feels like a very pointed response to the pushback on As Deep as the Grave, as we hear him intone, “Don’t fear the dead. And don’t fear me.” But you don’t have to fear AI Val Kilmer to still feel pretty creeped out by AI Val Kilmer. And to know that the best person to play this role would be, shockingly enough, a real person.
https://assets-prd.ignimgs.com/2026/04/17/adatg-ai-val-thumb-1776388183704.jpg?width=1280&format=jpg&auto=webp&quality=80
https://www.ign.com/articles/as-deep-as-the-grave-filmmakers-defend-recreating-val-kilmer-using-ai
NormanOsborn
Almontather Rassoul
